Sarah Hughes is a saxophonist, music educator, poet, and visual artist from Pasadena, Maryland. She currently resides in Glenmont, Maryland.
Sarah Marie Hughes graduated from the New England Conservatory in 2015 with a master’s degree in Jazz Saxophone Performance. She took lessons there with Jerry Bergonzi, Ran Blake, Donny McCaslin, and Anthony Coleman, gaining a unique and expansive perspective on styles of improvised music. After graduating, Sarah returned to Maryland and moved to Baltimore where she freelanced and taught music at Towson University, McDaniel College, Music & Arts Center, The International School of Music, and Prince George’s County Public Schools. While freelancing, Hughes led and was part of several projects that recorded and performed around DC, Maryland, Virginia, New York City, and beyond, including bands Coy Fish, ZARA, Janel Leppin’s Ensemble Volcanic Ash, and Steve Arnold’s Sea Change. Her work earned her a place on a few Top 5 lists for DC’s best jazz albums and best rising saxophonist award. In addition to her music, Sarah’s visual art brought her to an interdisciplinary art residency in Zalaegerzeg, Hungary and paid rent for at least two months.
Prior to attending NEC, Hughes earned a bachelor’s degree in Music Eduction from the University of Maryland in 2008. She taught elementary school band and strings classes in Prince George’s County for 5 years while cutting her teeth in Brad Linde’s Bohemian Cavern’s Jazz Orchestra and the Brad Linde Ensemble, where she performed a variety of classic jazz repertoire including the works of Gil Evans, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Charles Mingus, and Teddy Charles. Thanks to those ensembles, Hughes shared the stage with Jazz legend, Lee Konitz, while she was still just a novice. During this nascent period, she had several lessons with Konitz while also making weekly pilgrimages to New York to attend Barry Harris’s bebop workshops. After returning from NEC and Hungary, Sarah spent another two years with Prince George’s County public schools, having the opportunity to utilize new perspectives on improvised music and art in the band room. She left promptly in 2021 with the COVID outbreak but continued playing and teaching private lessons until 2024. In 2023 she played on the Britannia, a cruise ship out of London that sailed the Caribbean Sea for 4 months. Finding the experience claustrophobic and worsening long-standing issues with anxiety that emerged in 2014, she returned to DC where she had one more original Jazz project with vibraphonist Chris Barrick, bassist Steve Arnold, and drummer Mike Kuhl. At the end of 2024 Hughes decided to leave the Baltimore/DC scenes for an unknown amount of time, spontaneously settling in affordable and sequestered Rochester, NY for 6 months. During her time in Rochester, Hughes experimented with substitute teaching in Rochester’s charter schools as well as continuing to make and sell visual art online. She soon tired of being estranged from her family and other such support systems that might help combat a worsening paranoid illness, and returned to Baltimore in 2025.
Hughes’ work is repeatedly described as both visionary and creative. Even as a child, Sarah knew that she was to search for an original sound that expresses her innermost being. Embracing genre-fluidity, Hughes’ own projects are a mixture of intuitive, melodic composition, tone and density sensitivity, and lo-fi, raw improvised acoustic sound. Experimentation with original electronic filters keeps her saxophone on the cutting edge of the avant-garde.